Crystal Reports
Unless I'm wrong, most of the Crystal Reports entries will be rants :)
Yes I know it's been a while since I blogged about my *favorite* development tool... but that's only because I haven't had to touch it! That smooth series of events was shattered yesterday with me experiencing the Thrill of Victory and Agony of Defeat in multiple cycles... and as you can guess it involved Crystal Reports. So here's the deal... I'm working inside what a fellow developer called a 'Draconian' environment. .NET 2.0 is the 'standard' although I installed 3.5 SP1 on this box (and either...
The customer agreed with me that the amount of time I've spent is plenty, and I've not heard anything back from anyone else getting more than 10 reams of blank paper inserted between two lines in a Crystal Reports PDF file... hmmm did Business Objects buy one of the printer paper distributorships?? I agree that producing a PDF file and then printing that PDF file produces a very nice output, primarily because there is no header/footer text on the printout and the paging is handled a little better...
This one is going to be mid-rant because I can't even find anyone else that has hinted at having this problem...arggghhh! The problem: The current problem is when a couple of my reports print, they want to print 5,572 pages which is about 5,568 too many! I've got some pretty complex reports in some legacy packages that I support, i.e. I didn't write it, I just need to keep it running and add onto it. The reports look fine great, but at the top of the report is a button with the text: "Printable Version"....
Ok I've visited this one before, but now I'm just a tad scared, because first I had the VS2003 .NET 1.1 bits working on the server, then I went through the whole IIS and VS2005 .NET 2.0 CR bits. Now this morning I got email from a user that one of the reports is pooting... argggg... And it's the infamous "Load Report Failed" error. I tried and of course, it poots on my system as well :( ... I tried the .NET 2.0 "Merge" version and wow... that sucker just flies .. cool! So back to Google and a bunch...
This one isn't a rant... surprise! ... this one is to report how I resolved the latest problem I had and some of the web resources I used for it. I've been working moving some web applications and associated Oracle databases from an old server to a new virtual one. I finally got the production applications running and had asked the IT folks to give me an alias through DNS to my test .NET 2.0 application that I want to run on the same server. First I had problems with getting 404 errors, and that'll...
Here we are again cussing at Crystal Reports. Actually things between me and CR have been amazingly good for quite a while. I knew there was a problem coming though... I'm doing way too many weird things. I have to move these two web apps, and in doing so, they're moving to a bright, shiny, spanking new virtual server. Not sure what spanking has to do with new, but I'll let it pass. I figured there'd be some bumps in the road and of course the first one was that the new server had no clue what Crystal...
It's been a while since I posted my last Crystal Reports rant and I've been walking around this sucker on egg shells because I've made multiple xsd changes and gotten them into the reports without having it puke and die on me like it normally does... so that's a good thing. The bad thing is that all of a sudden I'm getting a very weird "Page header or footer longer than a page" message. So I go to Google and I find others that have had the same problems and have resolved it by making sure the print...
After the Altiris-a-rama was complete, I finally got back to this. Very possibly the workstation was in a 'weird mode' Friday, Monday AND yesterday during my other problems, <start spin> but it doesn't excuse the other things that were going on surrounding Crystal Reports, e.g. the Exception message</start spin> I worked as if I only had one shot to get it right: Got a Diet Dr. Pepper and 2 Extra-Strength Excedrines Refreshed from Version Control Modified the element I wanted to replace...
I'm not convinced that the Crystal Reports "Exception" is a real deal in my case because of two conflicting scenarios I restored from Version Control, pulled out all but two of the existing fields in the xsd element I wanted to replace. I modified the query to pull from a different table. I added one field of the two I need into the element, and when I added the 2nd one, I got the exception. I could not make the exception go away by backing off the work I'd done. I restored from Version Control,...
This one is a grand example of why I have such warm and fuzzies about Crystal Reports: Reference Part II from yesterday. It is 2:58 on Tuesday. I've been dorking with this since Friday afternoon sometime. About 1/2 hour ago I pulled everything back in from Version Control for about the 4th time today. I modified the existing subreport by pulling fields out of the element associated with the report, and miraculously got it to accept it. I then went into the code behind and pulled the data from the...
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